Genesi, makers of the Pegasos PowerPC motherboard, have been awarded Best of Show at the Freescale Technology Forum. The winning demonstration was an Open Source home media center fanless system built around the MPC7447 processor, which was judged according to technical merit, market impact, practical application and coolness.

At the Freescale Technology Forum this week, Freescale demonstrated its new 7448 (“G4”) processor, due to reach full production in October. It is expected to run up to 1.7 GHz and consume around 10 watts, and will be offered with the Tundra Tsi108 system controller in the HPC II reference design.

IBM has launched “The OpenPower Project”. We’re not quite sure what it is yet, but it talks about the remote access you can get through the University of Augsburg and the University of Peking (but omits the University of Portland), and links to lots of other places. It also politely asks you to disable pop-up ad blocking in your web browser…

A recent News.com article covers the Apple switch to x86 and its impact on IBM, emphasizing the projected volumes and impact of the Cell processor in game consoles: “Though Apple’s move won’t hurt IBM’s Power processor manufacturing business much, there are direct effects elsewhere in its business.” Included are quotes from Kai Staats (Terra Soft Solutions) and Colin Charles (Fedora PPC).

IBM has released an Slimline Open Firmware (SLOF), an experimental firmware for JS20 blades, under a BSD license. A proprietary board-specific object file needed for low-level initialization on JS20 has not yet been provided, though developers could write their own for their own systems. Also, the tool needed to package the resulting firmware into a flashable image is provided, but only as a PowerPC Linux executable.